Online package management has made Linux usable for desktop and even today's rapid development environments. Prior to the introduction of these solutions like Apt and Yum there were manual builds required of source code to meet the dependency needs of software you wanted to install. I recall spending a day trying to satisfy all the requirements of Gedit on an old version of red hat. Now with today's high speed internet and package management that's like a 10 second command.
This change happened a long time ago though. Debian stable releases included APT starting Debian 2.1 in 1999, RH resisted for long and finally included yum in late 2003. But agreed, it was a big improvement for workstation use.
